100

This is my 100th post! Indulge me a little. I'm going to use this post to rant on about myself and give you the impression I have an enlarged sense of ego (or id, if you're into Freud), it's probably the correct assumption. If you've heard this from me before, or been part of the story, sorry for boring you. But we're still cool, right?

So, as you can tell by now, I love writing, and reading. Even when I'm not reading books (having only completed 38 of my 50 book challenge for goodreads this year) I'm reading. I've been working my way through the sporkings on Mervin and co's livejournal community (and I've read the six-and-a-half Ariana Black stories, the five-and-a-half Twilight ones, one fifty shades one and three-and-a-half Rose Potter ones so that's actually fifteen not included on goodreads. Ha, screw you system! Fifty-three!) or I'm reading posters, my son's schoolwork, stories to my son (tonight, two Mr Men books and a chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) ... it's a big thing for me. So now you get to find out how that came to be, you lucky things, you.

I don't remember books being in our first house, when it was just my mum, my two brothers, my sister and me. Look, my mum had to give up work to raise the four of us when my dad split, and we were using cardboard boxes for furniture. Our main TV was about the size of an iPad, and in black-and-white. She met my stepdad when I was three, and got married to him when I was four (I approved, because he made good tomato soup and had these weird soup bowls that we still have somewhere, and never use now. Also, my stepsister had an impressive My Little Pony collection. He ticked all my four-year-old boxes) and he introduced me to Narnia. Like, no shitting, he would read me Narnia, and Roald Dahl, and he had a colour TV so we could watch those BBC reinactments of things like Narnia, and the BFG film, and he really engaged me in reading.

I went to school. I hated it, it was boring. They would set three pieces of work for the day in the morning, and I'd finish that shit in an hour. I would play dress up or read my way through the mini-library in the classroom. My parents went nuts when they realised I spent most of my time playing by myself because the work was too easy. I went to a school geared for learning difficulties, they more than stunted me. I got moved to a school in another town - the infant school connected to my stepdad's junior school - and my brothers and sisters had to come too. First time I ever heard of 'science hour' or 'music class'. I struggled with the change. But the one good thing was, I had to go to the junior school after my school finished, and wait for my stepdad to drive us home. I had to wait in the library.

I read the shit out of that library in the five years it was my after-school babysitter. When I wasn't playing chess with my brother or going to orchestra, choir, football, netball, tennis, French lessons, computer club, recorder club, flute practice, Christian Union (they tried to get us in clubs to halt the boredom. I think it's why I get erratically obsessed with so many things now). I would insist on weekly visits to the library, max out my allowable and read as I was leaving. Sometimes, I finished the first book before we got home. I got given the teen level allowable when I was still nine, because I liked the Sweet Valley series. I read a tonne of shit I shouldn't have because of that thing.

I liked daydreaming, when I wasn't reading. I liked pretending I was friends with the Babysitters Club girls. I liked imagining I lived in Sweet Valley. I didn't write any of my daydreams down (I could negotiate my way to some pens and paper out of my pocket money, sure, but I was always hungry and craving sweets, I had a limited amount of money, and whenever I got paper and pens my mind went blank). I used to wish I could type like my stepdad's secretaries ...

My year four teacher, Miss Cox, was amazing. She had an incredible imagination. We were studying Christopher Columbus and the Aztecs? We had to bake Ships Biscuits, learn Sea Shanties, make Aztec jewellery, she brought a hotplate in so we could make stuffed tortillas. She brought her brother in, to teach us to draw portraits and play baseball. She was so good at music. We did another project, and she constructed a booth for us to pretend it was a travel agency, and we made our own passports, currency, debit cards, and 'paid' to 'fly' all over the place. She brought in her cat. Her voices when she read us books? Wow. I was sick a lot that year - I had a gum boil and was swallowing a lot of pus and feeling sick, and ended up having four teeth pulled in the year - but I still remember a lot of her lessons. But the best thing about Miss Cox? Was the stories. Write what would happen if you had a time machine. What does it look like? Who was there? What did you do and when did you go? I've locked you in the classroom for a month, write a diary in that time. Guys, I still remember these assignments because they gripped me so hard, and I don't remember much because of the effects of the TTP. Miss Cox is one of my favourite teachers of all time. She set my imagination on fire.

And then I got to high school. I was gifted - I took my eleven plus voluntarily and got into a school even further away from my house, but in another direction - but despite that I was naïve. I hadn't really paid attention to grammar and syntax before then, and I was paying for it at my high school. They were obsessed with the construct of language. Siobhan doesn't know the difference between a noun and an adjective? What the fuck is this plebeian doing in a grammar school? (seriously, I think I got the concept when I was nineteen. More on that later) Our creative writing projects were few and far between. I was being stamped down. Miss Cox's fire was being put out.

For a school made for genius girls, they were kind of slow on the uptake. So was I, to be fair. I would get sixes and sevens on my assignments, until it was creative writing. I never got less than a nine on those. Why did they not grasp that I understood the basics of language on a primitive level? I know what word should go where, but the why went over my head.

A few high school assignments stand out for me, creative-writing-wise. I think it's the majority of what we got given, which is a little scary. Two from first year, one from fifth year (when I twigged my English MO). The first one was a joint effort, we were read a short story called The Fury, about a man obsessed with rabbits. My memory blurs the actual story with the assignment, but in a group we had to write what happened next. Me and my group - two other girls, the one on This Morning and a geologist, now - decided to split the story. Lindsey got the first part, Mel got the middle, I got the end. We wrote separately, at home, put our story together ... it fit. It was morbid, there was a lot of blood and guts and gore. We were so pleased.

The other ... do you remember those Young Letter Writer competitions? The cut-off age is twelve. The year my high school entered me, they were making a book of poems rather than a letter competition. My teacher decided we had to pair up, and pick an animal to write about, then write individual poems. No two pairs could pick the same animal. The girl I normally sat next to, Gemma, decided with Mel that they were going to write about an Artic fox (to this day, not a fucking Scooby about that one) so I turned to Lindsey, who normally sat with Mel just behind us. She wanted to write about lions. I really couldn't care less either way, I thought the assignment was stupid.

Look, me and my friends ... we'd bonded because we were young-minded. These are the girls who, at eleven and twelve, introduced me to the Teletubbies. Let that sink in for a second. Needless to say, we loved Disney. I still do, actually. Anyway, so I made my assignment about the Lion King, because I'm awesome. I took it to the teacher to check, and she told me it sounded like something Disney would make into a movie and I had to redo it. I was so mad, it was a stupid assignment and duh, it was the Lion King and I hated her so much. Oh, I rewrote it. I killed every single fucking lion off, in twelve short lines of prose. I took it back, wanting to be chewed out this time for not taking the assignment seriously ... and heard 'this is good, see what you can do when you put your mind to it?' My God I was pissed off at the end of that lesson. I did learn, however, that I wrote pain better than I wrote fluff (this was before The Fury, btw). I got a letter saying my poem would be in the book. It was £17, if we wanted a copy. Creepily, the anthology is called From A Secret Place. You wanna read the poem? I've memorised that shit, because dude, I got published at eleven. Here it is, glaze over it if you want:

The Lion

Child

A very young lion, barely born
Golden all round is he,
Lying in his mothers arms,
Perfect in every way.

Teenager

Lying in the long grass,
Watching the zebra play,
Suddenly he hears a gun shoot,
And sees his mother and father, dead

Adult

All alone with golden mane,
Surrounding his face and ears,
Wanting a mother and father again,
He starves on the plain.

... so don't piss me off about my writing, yes? I kept the original stanza's from the Lion King version, if you were wondering about the age thing.

So the last assignment I remember from high school, when I was having my 'how Siobhan learns English' epiphany? It was a truly creative writing project, not a bounce-off from something else. We had to write a story about meeting our boyfriend's parents, but we had to make it interesting. I threw so much unlikely shit into it, it was practically a fanfic. Bad directions, mother couldn't drive, wrong address, boyfriend was a triplet so I kissed the wrong guy, his brother had an allergic reaction to ham (I don't know. I was a vegetarian. Meat sucked) ... best thing about year eleven, because the bitch who gave that assignment had an assignment of her own called 'make Siobhan cry every lesson, and try to persuade her not to take her English GCSE's and hide any and all of her decent coursework' but it backfired, because even with my D-grade assignments, I got a fucking A. She couldn't look me in the eye in sixth form.

But in parallel to all this, at fourteen I had discovered the internet. Ah, internet, I love you *hugs the internet* my first time on an a1 message board, this girl - Sammie - told me I had to give her my email address and I had to have hers and we were going to be friends. I was a little intimidated. I thought she was really popular on the board, since I'd seen her chatting to other people. But we started emailing, and I realised she wasn't the scary dragon my first interpretation had led me to believe. She introduced me to people like Lisa and Hanne, one of whom I'm still in contact with and one has melted off the face of the earth. She also told me she'd written an a1 fanfic and I had to read and give her brilliant reviews (don't judge her on that, I was still intimidated). I read and ... you know when you're in the car and you crest a hill and the decline is steeper than you thought and you get that swooping sensation in your stomach? That happened. People wrote stories ... about bands? And actors? And other things? Dude, I would watch Malcolm In The Middle and then fanfic Malcolm in my head, but I didn't think other people wanted to read that shit! But they DID! I read, I absorbed, I created a msn page to post my very own first fanfic, about me and my friends from another chatroom creating a band and meeting all these other bands. I stuck in some purple prose and thought I was the shit.

I got the bug back. I would write fanfics in my free periods and lunch periods. I would bring extra notebooks into school to feed the bug. I wrote Sammie into my second fanfic, and a lot of subsequent ones, as a thank you for reconnecting me with something I loved.

We were doing options at school. I looked up 'author' in potential vocations, but it was so limited and ambiguous, and my school were so harsh about us making something of ourselves that I scared myself out of it. Stupid bitch that I am. I spent like, 80% of my lunchtimes in high school in the library, I was a freaking librarian. I got to the point where, when the head librarian asked me to print Dewey Decimal codes for books, I would look at the content and know where it belonged. Biology, 603.1. Autobiographies, 931.

I was still writing. God, I loved writing. Why wasn't I doing it all the time before? I had so many stories exploding in my head. I wrote collaborations, one-offs, series ... anything and everything. In those fanfics, I wrote about a girl called Louise Manning, in a story I called Unattainable. I didn't make the connection for a while, but she was the first germ of an idea I had for Lambrini (and now, anyone who ever read it is making the connection too, right down to the bullying and the brother thing). It was when I was writing my biggest one, that I called Not Another Teen Fic (harrrseewhatIdidthar!) that Uprooted really started to take shape in my head. By then, I was in uni, bored and unhappy and unstimulated. I was writing about four fanfics at once, but I wanted to undertake Uprooted for what it was. I wanted to do it right. I started planning it like crazy.

I left uni, still planning the story, still writing drafts and connecting characters and assigning storylines, and went to work in McDonald's, which I had joined between my second and third years (when Tom Hanks was filming in my uni town for the Da Vinci Code. Fucking waste of an opportunity, that). I met a real-life Fiesta, a real crazy girl who, amongst other things, faked having a baby. I could not make that shit up. She even looked like the Fiesta in my head. I had to remind myself of her name all the freaking time. I spent a lot of time on the cash booth of drive thru, and when there were no cars, I was creating scenes. I wrote a large proportion of the storyline in that cramped three-feet-by-three-feet space.

I had my son, and got ready to start writing. I wrote a few scenes, but nothing felt right. And then I started sleeping too much, until I got hospitalised. I was awake just to work before that. When I was in hospital, my hands swelled up too much to hold a book. I had the Half-Blood Prince on the bedside table, and I couldn't hold it. I hated hospital. I tried to storyboard, but Lamb and Carter had left me. It took until my transfer, until about four days of plasmapheresis, until I could hold a book. My friend Bethan sent me some sweets, and her mum (who used to work with my mum, which is how we met. I was three and she was two) had sent me a book to read. Not my usual style, but I was desperate for something normal. I consumed that book.

I got home, and realised just how sick I'd been when I got exhausted just getting out of bed. I couldn't understand anyone. So, me being me, I picked up a book. And life got a little easier. I got more books. I spent so much of my savings filling the craving I suddenly had to read, more books, more YA stories, just more. I turned back to Uprooted, rewrote my notes (we moved house when my son was three months, about nine before I got sick, and my notes were still packed) from what I remembered. I started writing. I wrote nearly three books. I sent the first one off to agents. No go. I re-read, and got bored. I understood what the problem was. I wrote it too soon after the TTP. My language had to develop more, I had to stop being so emo about what had happened. Lambrini's voice alone stilted the storyline. Seriously, she was so unaware of so many things, and I was trying to write around too much. I gave Carter a voice, and he just repaired so much damage for me, in the book and in my outlook. For me, Carter is the backbone of the story, just because of that change and what it represents to me.

I started whoring this version out to my friends, like Sammie (she has to be first, it's because of her I do this now), and Cat, and Kelly, and Lydia. I learned about Beta readers, and the names of things like parentheticals and definite articles, and therefore understood better why the first version didn't work. I put this version onto the other blog I have, connected to this one, and took advantage of Jenny Trout's beta reader system. The link to the first chapter is the link I put for my homepage on things like facebook, twitter, goodreads, and it's introduced me to people like Milou and Tallie.

I was thinking about writing the other day, and my attitude to it. It's not like it was when Sammie showed me a fanfic, when it was fun and a giggle and you'd do things like write your friend getting the famous guy. It goes deeper than that for me, because of what I almost lost. Guys, I'm brain damaged, I'm facing a future where I will get dementia. Not maybe, definitely. I need to do it, like I need to breathe, like I need to eat, like I need to sleep. Writing was part of my recovery, part of my therapy, it's how I understand big concepts and small gestures. I may never be published, or never published professionally anyway. And that's fine. But I will never stop writing, because it's part of me. It makes up too much of who I am. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'm not a writer because I'm famous (I'm not) or successful (I work in a McDonald's) or personable (I have a lot of social anxiety, which I'm too scared to express. Like, I need to get my haircut, but I still haven't grown the balls to walk into a hairdressers. I said it a few months ago in another post and I haven't gone in the interim), I'm a writer because I don't know what else to be. I'm a writer like I'm brunette, like I love Harry Potter, like I'm typing on my laptop right now. I'm a writer ... because I'm a writer.

Do you know what scared me most when I was laying dying in the hospital? That I hadn't finished Lamb and Carter's story. I was terrified for my son more, of course, but my parents are not so callous as to leave him to his own devices or put him up for adoption, and they told me after that they were preparing to fight his father for custody if the worst happened. But no one knew Uprooted as thoroughly as I do. Even in either sets of notes - and the two differ a lot, like in the first draft it was the Evans twins who didn't get along, Carter and Curtis were BFF's - I hadn't put in my secrets, the twists I wanted in there at the very end. I don't know if this worry makes me sick or what, I don't even know if it's common. But it scared me anyway.

I know my grammar still isn't perfect, I write in streams of consciousness and syntax goes out of the window that way. I know I do typos and go off on tangents and introduce new topics horribly. But stick with me, because I am working my ass off, more than anyone can ever imagine, and I will get better at it. I will improve.